New generation follows others' footsteps at River Berry

Jun. 2, 2011

Farmer David Marchant of River Berry Farm in Fairfax, sits with his daughter, Ada Sorensen, 9, in their truck at the Burlington Farmers Market. Marchant runs the farm with his wife, Jane Sorensen. They started their diversified, organic fruit and vegetable farm in 1991. / SALLY POLLAK, Free Press

Written by

If you go

 WHAT: River Berry Farm  WHERE: 191 Goose Pond Road, Fairfax  FARMSTAND: Open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily  INFORMATION: 849-6853; www.riverberryfarm.com FAVORITE FOODS: Farmer David Marchant's favorite crop on the farm is romaine lettuce. It's coming up now and will be available until October. Marchant likes crunch when he bites into lettuce; the baby greens don't cut it for him, he said. "I like salad that you can chew," Marchant said. "I want it crunchy, instead of melting like paper. If you want fiber, you've got to eat something that's got some fiber in it." He recommends Caesar salad with fresh romaine, and a dressing of olive oil, parmesan cheese and garlic.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Ada Sorensen, 9, helped her father at the Burlington Farmers Market last Saturday.

At her family's River Berry Farm stand, on the College Street sidewalk, Ada waited on customers and collected cash — calculating in her head the change on a $7.50 purchase paid with a $20 bill.

(That's $12.50, for all you computer-assisted cashiers.)

Ada's parents, David Marchant and Jane Sorensen, own River Berry Farm in Fairfax, an organic fruit and vegetable farm. She and her brother, Huck, 12, like strawberry season on the farm, their father said.

Marchant, 53, grew up in western New York. Sorensen is from Iowa. Their grandparents were farmers; their parents, who grew up on farms, were not.

"We're a generation removed," Marchant said. "That seems to be a common theme. If you grow up on a farm, you don't want to farm."

Marchant and Sorensen met at the New Alchemy Institute, an ecology/agricultural research center on Cape Cod.

Sorensen is a former landscape architect. Marchant studied agricultural sciences as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and a graduate student at UMass-Amherst.

"I was pruning apple trees and thought I might as well go back to school," Marchant said. "I always knew I wanted to try farming, and we wanted to try working for ourselves first."

Marchant and Sorensen started their farm in 1991, and these days cultivate 50 acres of organic vegetables and 4 and a half acres of berries. They chose the farm on the Lamoille River for its soils, Marchant said.

The place was right, too, because Sorensen had a job as a landscape architect. The plan — five years at a job off the farm — worked. Sorensen joined her husband as a full-time farmer in 1997, an endeavor that supports their family.

River Berry Farm has been a fixture at the Burlington Farmers Market since 1994, though about 80 percent of what they grow is sold wholesale, Marchant said.

The farm belongs to a distribution collective, Deep Root Organic Truck Farmers Coop, that ships organic produce to stores in Vermont and out of state.

Through its 140-member CSA, and the farmers market, River Berry also sells directly to consumers.

As a 20-year veteran of diversified produce farming in Vermont, Marchant has seen this type of agriculture grow.

It's a way to get into farming without a huge capital expense, in particular relative to dairy, he said. And people like selling directly to customers.

But he points to another factor that likely shaped and influenced Vermont's diversified vegetable farmers.

"There's people way before me, a huge group of farmers, that doesn't get a lot of press that kind of paved the way for us up here," Marchant said. "A lot of people have been doing it a long time, very innovative farmers. I've always been impressed how smart and innovative the farmers were in Vermont."

This earlier generation of farmers, including Paul Harlow in Westminster, Jake and Liz Guest in Norwich, and Bob and Kim Gray in Newbury, helped lay the groundwork for the work of Marchant and Sorensen, and the newer generation of farmers, Marchant said.

"We copied what other people were doing," he said. "People had experimented and tried things; and we experimented and tried things. The whole greenhouse tomato thing, these guys started playing with it 20 years ago."